The Neverhood

If anyone has any true recollection of this game, I would be surprised. My memory of this one goes way back to when I was a kid. (For reference, Wikipedia says this game was released in 1996.) I remember playing this one afternoon at a friend's house and that's it. One afternoon for no more than a few hours. However, a couple of years ago this memory - somehow – resurfaced giving me this desperate urge to play it. The only problem being I couldn't recall its name. The Never-World? Never-Earth? Don’t know the name... will never find the game. Now, I have to give props to Sween. After relaying my conundrum to him a few weeks ago, he sure enough popped back in a couple of seconds confirming the correct name: The Neverhood! (I was so close.)

This is an adventure game in the vein of Adventures in Monkey Island or Grim Fandango - only in CLAYMATION! The game is just the barebones (and what I mean by that is it’s world is relatively short and concise), but brilliant in its simplicity. The game beings with your character, Clayman, sleeping in a house. You wake, solve a couple of simple puzzles to open the front door, and begin the game. There's no introduction to give you any guidance on what you're suppose to do. No goals. No nothing. You just walk out onto this colorful, strange world... and begin exploring. Meandering from one strange building to the next, attempting to assembling a mental map of this place. This all might seem strange - or even frustrating - but they do build a story into game. It's a slow process, but it exists. Throughout the game you find these tapes occasionally laying on the ground. They're 30 second clips of the origin story to the Neverhood and eventually explain your reason and purpose for being here. It's not until the very end of the game that you have the ability to collect every tape; therefore, it's not until the end of the game that you actually being to understand everything. And it’s sweet payoff once you do reach that point.

Now for an adventure-thinking game (I don’t know the exact genre name here) it’s fairly vague on what you’re suppose to do or how to do it. You may push a button and hear a weird sound effect, but nothing else happens. Shrug it off. Then reach a room way across the map where you realized it allowed you to open a door or something. The developers must have had a lot of faith in their fans to trust that they would be able to figure these ambiguous riddles out for themselves. Alas, I wish I could say I was clever enough to conquer all these challenges myself, but occasionally I did refer to a walkthrough. No shame, though. If it wasn’t for the walkthrough I would have never known that in order to get one of the last tapes (by the way, you do need every single tape to beat the game) was to walk down this long, long corridor called the Hall of Records. It’s about 25 slow side-scrolling frames you trump by (reminiscent of the never-ending staircase from Mario 64) until you reach the end where a tape lies on the floor as your rewards. Yeah… would have never know that otherwise.

So, maybe the game design isn’t the best, but that’s not why I loved this game. It’s the look. It’s the sounds. It’s the odd tone and humor. I don’t know if I could ever effectively convey how wacky this game is without anyone out there have actually have played it, but it’s bonkers. While outside exploring this Dr. Suess-esque world, the soundtrack is this ominous, bleak, atonal sound. You would think some monstrosity is about to sneak up and slit your throat. Then you enter a building and all of a sudden the music changes this bizarre, folksy crap that’s just plain ridiculous. Then you come to your occasional cut-scenes. They are normally focused on cartoon violence that can only be summed up as a more gruesome version of Looney Tunes. I hope you’re getting a little bit of the picture here, but, honestly, this is just one of those things that you have to experience yourself.

That being said. This is a game that long ago went out of production. Now while I have heard rumors that they hope to bring this little gem to tablets and smartphones one day… who knows when, if ever, that will actually be. So if anyone is in fact interested in playing this, let me know and I’ll ship my copy out to you. I’ve had my fill, but now it’s time for it go forth and frustrate someone else. Any takers?